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Bobbie Whitcombe taught English in secondary schools for some years and now works as an editor of children's books for Fontana, the paper-back section of Collins.
Farrukh Dhondy was born in 1944 in Poona in Western India. A teacher of English in London comprehensive schools for some years, he is increasingly well-known in Britain for his stories about the pressures of urban living, and racial tension in particular. He has twice won The Other Award for ‘non-biassed books of literary merit’: in 1977 withEast End at Your Feet and in 1979 withCome to Mecca, which had already won the 1978 Short Stories Award in the Collins/Fontana Campaign for Books for Multi-Ethnic Britain. His books have been compared with those of Rosa Guy in the United States and hailed as filling a serious gap in British children's literature in representing the rights of ethnic minorities. In fact, Farrukh Dhondy himself has said that racism is ‘not historically important’. He sees it as a ‘cultural outbreak’ in the overall structure of society, and indeed his writing is not simply antiracist: it is as complex and subtle as the area of society and its interrelationships that he observes.
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Whitcombe, B. East-West: the divided worlds of Farrukh Dhondy. Child Lit Educ 14, 35–43 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01135793
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01135793